Posts by linger
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Access: Zika and microcephaly: things to…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
there must surely be a corresponding rate of microcephaly in the babies of African women infected with Zika
No, for the same reason that we don’t have a high incidence of shingles in the adult population (i.e., most people get chicken pox in childhood and thereby become immune).
Where Zika and its carrier are endemic, then people get, and recover from, and become immune to, Zika in childhood, therefore don’t get it during pregnancy. It’s only where the carrier invades new territory (as in Brazil) that large numbers of previously unexposed adults can get Zika. -
Access: Zika and microcephaly: things to…, in reply to Thomas Lumley,
Ae. albopictus (the Asian tiger mosquito) is one of the bloodsuckers I live with in Japan, though fortunately not active all year round in my area. It is listed as one of the 100 most invasive species worldwide; it already has invaded NZ on several occasions and been re-eradicated, and is well on the way to becoming naturalised in many parts of Latin America and in California, making the “Asian” bit of the name increasingly inaccurate.
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to Russell Brown,
posh kids
What they are is entitled brats. Belonging to the elite may reliably correlate and be causally connected with that outcome, but it’s not exactly the same thing.
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Polity: Protesting too much: responses…, in reply to Stuart Coats,
Maybe I’m just feeling tired and bitter this morning……
I thought it was just part of being forty(something).
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Polity: Protesting too much: responses…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
That would be met by an equally obvious bastard corporate workaround: increasing the number of part-timers so that no ordinary worker would ever meet the criterion. Some sort of bulk equivalence would be needed to get around that: funding x hours of training for every y hours of employee labour in total. (Which then raises the question of how staff are selected or prioritised for training: some mix of companies needing to upskill workers in certain positions, and training driven by workers' own needs, would be necessary.)
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Polity: Protesting too much: responses…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
One of the many problems with user-pays education is that it quickly removed the “public good” perception among students themselves:
“I paid (and am still paying) for this, therefore it is mine.”
That’s an attitudinal change that will take generations to reverse. -
Polity: Protesting too much: responses…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
I’d agree that there does need to be some mechanism in NZ for industry to fund R&D, and HR to fund staff development, to a much larger extent than at present (I see these as parallel problems, whose solutions should be very similar in structure; you could call the combination Work Smarter). But doesn’t it rather suck to be self-employed under the scheme you suggest: forced to pay a levy, without being able to take the time to undergo formal retraining yourself?
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David Bowie: Verbatim (BBC Radio 4, 30 Jan 2016). 1 hour of David Bowie in his own words. Available to stream (indefinitely) or as a MP3 download (until the end of February).
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Polity: Protesting too much: responses…, in reply to Richard Wain,
As things stand, sure these threads in Speaker are partisan:
as much so as our current Speaker, so you can’t say the title isn’t apt.But clearly you missed the notice that Rob will be getting his own masthead here (presumably with an overt declaration of interest).
And, you know, last I looked (five minutes ago), Kiwiblog didn’t have any visible National branding. It’s very tempting to conclude – following your argument – that DPF should rectify that or blog off elsewhere too; but I recognise that’s not my call to make.
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Hard News: The CRL and the nature of change, in reply to Sacha,
How often is the distance adjustment readjusted to take account of fuel prices?